What's Missing?

Coined in 1969 by Alan Pritchard, bibliometrics is the set of mathematical and statistical methods to quantitatively analyze citations and content of academic literature. The technology has advanced rapidly in the age of computers as new algorithms are being developed to better gauge an author or journal’s impact in the field, and help researchers efficiently filter through research databases or select the most appropriate journal for publication. Bibliometrics encompasses citation count, journal impact factor (JIF), and h-index, among other metrics that can be used to support grant applications, attainment of new and tenured positions, and requests for raises or promotions. The demand for citation technologies has given rise to a crop of sophisticated filtering tools that are replacing old metrics with methods based on measurements of semantic publishing. These metrics take into account sharing and annotations via the web and exchanges of data to evaluate the impact of a scholarly work. Advances in bibliometrics are helping academic and research libraries maintain a competitive edge by maximizing the influence of their scientific outputs, and thus reinforcing their effort to gain funding.

INSTRUCTIONS: Enter your responses to the questions below. This is most easily done by moving your cursor to the end of the last item and pressing RETURN to create a new bullet point. Please include URLs whenever you can (full URLs will automatically be turned into hyperlinks; please type them out rather than using the linking tools in the toolbar).

Please "sign" your contributions by marking with the code of 4 tildes (~) in a row so that we can follow up with you if we need additional information or leads to examples- this produces a signature when the page is updated, like this: - SamOct 31, 2011

(1) How might this technology be relevant to the educational sector you know best?

your response here

another response here

(2) What themes are missing from the above description that you think are important?

your response here

another response here

(3) What do you see as the potential impact of this technology on teaching, learning, or creative inquiry?